Page 92 of To Pleasure a Prince

He frowned. “So Cicely was the only one to claim that you couldn’t read—”

“I know what you’re thinking. But Cicely did not ‘claim’ anything. She tried honestly to teach me. She would show me one letter, and I would see another. And yes, when I got older, I tested it on others. I would ask Simon to read a simple word for me, one of the few I’d managed to learn by sight. I remember distinctly asking him to read ‘was,’ and he told me it was ‘saw.’ ” Tears brimmed in her eyes. “I couldn’t even learn one word correctly.”

“So you gave up?” he said.

She glared at him. “Of course not, but it did discourage me. Still, I might have persisted if not for the headaches.”

“Yes, you mentioned headaches.”

“I get them whenever I attempt to read. Cicely consulted a doctor secretly, and he said that I should not try. That my brain was clearly damaged, possibly from a fever I’d had as a child, and that continuing to tax it might further damage it. So we…stopped the lessons.”

“And you’ve never tried again.”

“I try from time to time, but then the headaches come—”

“Yes, I understand.”

He understood, all right. Miss Tremaine had consulted some quack—or had pretended to consult some quack—and Regina, being a trusting child, had taken the damned idiot’s word for it that her brain was “damaged.”

He probed further. “So you don’t read at all? How do you manage? It’s not an easy thing to hide in society.”

“Oh, I have my methods.” Her smile looked forced. “If someone asks me to read, I just say my eyes are tired or I didn’t bring my spectacles or I’d rather read it later in private.”

As she’d done yesterday with Louisa’s letter.

“If someone is very persistent, like you were last night, I either lie about what I read or change the subject.” She shot him an arch glance. “Most people aren’t that persistent. And they’re not usually asking me to read anything scandalous, either.”

“How would you know since you can’t read?”

She shrugged. “Cicely is always close by to tell me what it really says when no one is paying attention. In fact, Cicely reads everything for me. She buys me the translations for the opera well in advance so she can read them to me. She writes and reads all my notes. She reads me the newspaper and my ladies’ magazines—”

“Which is how you’ve managed to hide it all these years,” he said dryly. “Otherwise, you might have been forced to learn, and then you wouldn’t have needed Miss Tremaine.”

She shot him a sharp glance. “Marcus, you must not blame Cicely for any of this. She has been very loyal to me. It cannot have been easy for her—never being able to leave my side, always having to read and write for me while hiding that fact from the world. The minute I need her to read something, she takes out her spectacles and does it without complaint.”

“Better that than to be cast into the street.”

Regina’s expression grew mutinous. “She knows I would never cast her in the street.”

“Does she? Your brother was more than ready to banish her to the country. If not for your need, she would have been forced to go, too. So of course she reads without complaint. For a poor relation, it’s better than the alternative.”

She sat up in bed to glare at him. “If you are trying to suggest that Cicely deliberately set out to deceive me about my defect—”

“No, not completely,” he murmured soothingly, though that was precisely what he thought. “But perhaps she has exaggerated the problem to make you dependent upon her.”

“The headaches are real! She did not invent them.Idid not invent them!”

“Of course not.” He sat up, too, cupping her flushed cheek in his hand. “But, dearling, plenty of people get the headache from doing all sorts of things. Still, they go on doing them, and they survive headaches without wreaking permanent damage on their brains.”

Tears spilled down her cheeks as she glanced away. “You don’t understand.”

“I do.” He gathered her into his arms. “Truly, I do. Headaches are awful things. I don’t get them myself, but Louisa does, and I know she suffers greatly from them.” He tightened his hold on her stiff body, searching for a way to convince her. “Tell me this, Regina, do you ride?”

“Yes,” she bit out.

“And when you first learned, weren’t your muscles very sore for days afterward? Didn’t your ass…er…bottom hurt every time you sat down? Didn’t your legs feel like rubber for a while?”

She went still. “Yes,” she said in a more subdued voice.